raspberryturk | Office Hours, Thursday

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Office Hours, Thursday

Reno... really didn't have anything better to do today but come and hang out in his office, no.

Okay, sure, so there was the mother of all freaking bouquets on his desk, courtesy of his smart-assed co-teacher. And the flowers were starting to go a little...

Uh. Soggy, Reno supposed, was a good word for it.

So he was here today, up to his elbows in rotting flowers, with his nose wrinkled as he picked out all the valuable little nick-nacks from inside of it.

Pearls? Seriously?

The one upside, anyhow, was that Reno could sell some of this crap off and send the money back to Edge or Junon or something. This monster could totally go a long way, back home. Not that he suspected for an instant that maybe something like that was what Genesis had in mind...

[Open door, open office! Since I remembered that Reno actually has one of these things, today!]

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Friggin' timelines, anyhow. Reno didn't bother to bite back the beginnings of a scowl as he rolled his sleeves back down again.

"Messy shit, ain't it? Dabblin' in timelines. Never know how many nightmares an' half-stories you could trip over, when you go pokin' around, yo."

"You've seen my various family members around the island," Anakin said. "I know the issues that can crop up." He ran his fingers though his hair. "I won't tell him anything, but I was wondering if I could get the story from you, just so I help...ease his mind."

Reno pursed his lips a little at that. He hadn't really told anyone the whole story, front to back. It was long, it was messy. There were some things in there that he wasn't particularly proud of, and some that he'd spent the last few years beating himself up over.

"... You know, it's a whole world at stake, if any of this gets out?"

He had to make certain that there was no question in Anakin's mind about that, yes.

[I have to head off to sleep, now. Mind some SP?]

Anakin nodded. "You can trust my discretion," he said quietly. "Would you like me to chase the squirrels away?"

[NP! My brain is scattered too ;)]

Reno shrugged.

"I'll buy 'em a bottle of whatever the hell they want if they piss off," he replied. "The squirrels and I go way back, yo."

They understood one another.

"It's a long story," he added, as if that was going to somehow deter this conversation at all.

"If it lasts so long I don't have to go to glee club, I'm fine with that," Anakin said with a tiny smile.

Reno actually quirked the tiniest bit of a smile at that, himself.

"Fair enough." Really, Reno was neither a singer or a Banthabell enthusiast. Glee was so not his gig, either. "There's gonna be a couple things I gotta explain for you first, unless you know anything about Jenova, or Mako energy, yo."

Really, around here, it was hard to say who might have learned about what, really.

Anakin stared at him blankly. "Explain away," he said finally.

Reno snorted a little at the blank stare, but really, he wasn't all that surprised. He lifted one hand and held up two fingers, ticking off one and then the other as he got to each point.

"Right. So, Jenova. Freaky super-powerful alien thing that travels from planet to planet, drainin' each world of all life before jumpin' off to the next one out there to repeat the process. Presumably for shits and giggles, zoto." That wasn't too difficult, right? "Mako, that's what comes when you filter the life-source at the center of The Planet, Gaia, into a sort of liquid electrical power source. That life source, we call the lifestream, yo. It's where all life on Gaia comes from, an' it's where it all goes back to when we're done livin'."

If he wrinkled his nose any more, Reno's face would probably stick like that.

"Jenova's pretty much the root of all monsters on Gaia. She's been around a long time, comatose buried deep inside The Planet, havin' her way with the wildlife until there wasn't much left but monsters, no more. Not like ShinRa, our government at the time, knew that when they dug her up and started playin' with splicin' her cells with human test subjects."

Gaia's ethical code was very much... not.

[*Shoos away the greenish deer* Gaah, sorry.]

Anakin nodded along, frowning hard. Some of this story sounded like a twisted version of Jaina's fight with the Yuuzhan Vong.

"So they spliced tiny bits of Ultimate Evil into people without thinking about the potential consequences," Anakin said. "Lovely."

"Never said it was smart," Reno agreed, quirking a crooked smile. "They tried a few different ways goin' about it, yo. Injectin' host parents with the cells, that kinda thing. What you get when you take a grown person, though, and add Jenova cells with a healthy dose of Mako? You get Zack. SOLDIER."

Reno could totally shamelessly narc on the SOLDIER program for creating a breed of human monsters, yes.

Anakin hissed in a breath. "Sithspit."

Reno just gave his shoulder a shrug at that.

"Zack ain't really the problem," he noted, idly. "He stays good right up until the end, you don't gotta worry about that, yo. If anything, that treatment's gonna keep him from bein' screwed with more, down the road."

"How so?" Anakin asked, settling back into his chair.

"Well," Reno leaned back against the wall, crossing his arms over his chest, "there's a mess all on its own, zoto. Zack ends up goin' to this place, I ain't gonna name names or nothin' here, where one of them other Jenova-experiments goes completely bugfuck insane. Takes out the whole damn down, smirks at the survivors through the flames, that kinda crap. Between Zack and some no-name nothin' of an Infantry kid, they manage to take the guy down, but both of 'em are hurt pretty bad in the process."

And then Reno was giving his arms a stretch, casual as-you-please.

"ShinRa's health plan ain't exactly what they make it out to be when you sign up for SOLDIER, yo. Both of 'em were taken in for observation by the very wrong kinda doctor, yoto."

"I have a bad feeling about this," Anakin replied. "What happens then?"

"Few years of experimentation hell, bein' kept in a basement somewhere, while the doc who's got 'em tries to turn 'em both into copies of the psycho that got 'em into that situation to start with. Zack's considered a failed experiment. His SOLDIER cells ain't susceptible to this clone gig. His buddy ain't so lucky, and ends up genetically screwed ten ways to friggin' Sunday. That said, he's considered a failure, too."

Reno cast a glance at his desk. Damn, he needed to get a coffee maker or something for his office.

"Years later, Zack finally gets a chance. Busts 'em both out. But his buddy's pretty much just comatose by that point. Too much Mako has this funny way of throwin' people into comas. Most of 'em never wake up again. That don't stop Zack from haulin' his pal all over The Planet, on the run while ShinRa's got damn near their whole army chasin' after the escaped test subjects."

And the Turks, but Reno wasn't fessing up to more involvement in this mess than he really needed to.

Anakin's eyes were wide despite himself. "What happens next?"

Reno gave his shoulders a shrug.

"I wasn't there to see, but I saw enough of the reports passed around after the fact, yo. The army caught up with 'em. Zack must'a killed... shit... hundreds of men, easy, fightin' 'em off, but you get enough bullets in you, you gotta stop movin' eventually. The army didn't bother lookin' for Zack's pal. A case of Mako poisoning that bad... ain't like he'd get better from it, anyhow." And then Reno cracked a smile that wasn't pleasant in the least. "Only, he did. Spent the next... shit, year or so, thinkin' he lived Zack's life. We dunno how he got all them ideas in his head. Probably, Zack spent his time on the run talkin' to him 'bout this and that. Ain't like he ever got any company, otherwise."

Anakin let out a low whistle. "So does this whole thing have to play out exactly this way?"

Reno twitched a crooked little smile.

"There's the thing. The shit that went down in that facility is what messed up both of 'em, sure, but it's also what made Zack's buddy strong enough to take down the guy that they took out before. Because some guys just don't know when to stay down for the count, yo."

He sighed, looking up at the ceiling.

"I ain't drooling coma-boy's biggest fan. He an' I had it out more'n once after he woke up again. But if he wasn't tryin' to figure out who he was, if he didn't think he was former-SOLDIER, livin' Zack's life, odds are high that when Jenova's freakish clone-spawn came back to destroy the world, there wouldn't have been nobody there capable of stoppin' him from pullin' it off. Rocks fall, everyone dies, game over."

Anakin's eyes looked remorseful, but he nodded. "It's like a game of dominoes," he said. "You need them to fall in a certain way."

"Yeah," Reno sighed. "It's messy. Gaia is full of messy shit. Zack's one of them dominoes somewhere along the way. Things are already in motion, there ain't no way to keep it from gettin' bad. But it's all a measure of how bad it gets, from here."

Which was horribly pessimistic. Reno was well aware of that. But he hadn't survived the end of the world several times over by being a sunshine-spewing optimist, either.

Well, he was talking to a man who was ready to watch a planet explode in order to save the other version of himself, so Anakin wasn't exactly in a position to judge motive.

"So Zack's rescue of his friend is the key," he said quietly. "And I don't think that even if I wanted to, I could stop Zack's impulse to save someone he cares about."

"Probably not," Reno agreed with a small nod, looking back toward Anakin. "The kid's already taken down dragons and gods. There ain't a hell of a lot that's gonna keep him from savin' the only other person he's got in the world, several years down the road."

Really. He'd sacrificed himself for it. For someone who shouldn't have ever woken up again, anyhow.

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